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June, 2014. An entire year has passed, and I suddenly realize that I haven’t posted a new blog here in all that time. Things have been busy. Thanks to your willingness to follow me to 1854 London, MURDER AS A FINE ART made the New York Times bestseller list and for a while reached #1 among all books sold on the U.S. division of Amazon.

The Associated Press called it “a literary thriller that pushes the envelope of fear.” Library Journal chose it as one of the top five thrillers of 2013. Publishers Weekly called it “an epitome of the intelligent page turner” and chose it as one of the top ten mystery/thrillers of 2013.

In my four decades as an author, from First Blood through The Brotherhood of the Rose and Creepers, I’ve always tried to find new ways to write action and suspense. Readers know that I do my best to surprise them and take them to places they’ve never been.

My latest novel Murder as a Fine Art attempts to make you believe that you’re in 1854 London. It’s a blend of fact with fiction in a harrowing exhumation of the infamous Ratcliffe Highway murders, a series of mass killings that rivaled those of Jack the Ripper for terrorizing London and all of England.

Fans of First Blood,The Brotherhood of the Rose, and my other action/suspense novels might be surprised by the following:

In my youth, before I decided to be a writer, I almost chose a career in music. The rock-and-roll scene made me, like many teenagers, fantasize about being a performer. But unlike many of those teenagers, I realized that if I wanted to be in music, it would help to know something about it.

In 2010, with e-books starting to make their mark, I decided to experiment and release a novel that would be an e-book exclusive. It’s called THE NAKED EDGE. A sequel to my 2003 novel THE PROTECTOR, it features the following character:

He calls himself Cavanaugh. No first name, and even “Cavanaugh” isn’t his actual last name. He’s a protector. If you refer to him as a bodyguard, which he regards as a synonym for a thug, you won’t like his reaction. His hatred of bullies compelled him to enlist in Special Forces. Now as a civilian, he runs Global Protective Services, the world’s best security company. His goal? To defend the helpless, to keep predators from their prey.

My 2009 novel THE SHIMMER is about the mysterious Marfa Lights that have been appearing in west Texas since people first settled in the area in 1889. The lights are very real (I’ve seen them) and were sometimes chased by aircraft when the military had an airbase there in WWII. Because I love doing research and making details as accurate as possible, I knew that, to write these scenes, I’d need some experience as a pilot, so I went to my local airport in Santa Fe and signed up for a few flight lessons. I enjoyed these so much that I took even more lessons and eventually became a private pilot.

My writing tends to dramatize fear, with characters struggling to suppress it or else giving in to it. Sometimes I write about anxiety and panic attacks, a topic I know well because I suffered them twenty-five years ago when my fifteen-year-old son, Matthew, died from a rare bone cancer.

I describe these attacks in FIREFLIES. From the symptoms I experienced, I didn’t know which was going to kill me first, a heart attack or a stroke, but in the end, anxiety and panic attacks were the culprits.

Fifty years ago this month, on Aug. 5,1962, Marilyn Monroe’s body was discovered in her Los Angeles home. The circumstances have always been mysterious. Although the medical examiner’s verdict was probable suicide from a barbiturate overdose, President Kennedy and his brother hovered in the background in the days before her death. There was a long gap between when her physician declared that she was dead and when the police were called. The police investigation was shoddy. Conspiracy theories persist that she was murdered to keep her from revealing her affair with President Kennedy.

Readers often ask me about the action-skills training I receive when I write novels like THE PROTECTOR and THE NAKED EDGE. After the Colorado-theater shooting, I was reminded of my firearms training when gun sales increased because people wanted to be ready—“just in case.”

There are good reasons and bad reasons to carry a weapon in the United States. The pros and cons aren’t the subject of these remarks. What I want to talk about is training. When people tell me that they received a concealed-carry license after a day or two of instruction, I’m appalled. Anybody can easily learn how to fire a weapon. It’s not difficult. But there are so many other factors.

A few weeks ago, for research, I attended a law-enforcement course about interviews and interrogations. Several people asked me what happened there.

“Interrogation” has violent connotations. We think of people being beaten with rubber hoses etc. in scenes from old gangster films. Or else we think of the water boarding and sensory-deprivation techniques that I describe in my espionage story, “The Interrogator” (available as an e-story with a detailed introduction about my spy training).

But not in American law enforcement. An “interview” is a conversation with someone (a witness, for example) who has information that a police officer needs whereas an “interrogation” is a heightened, persistent conversation with a suspect for the purpose of obtaining a confession.

Recently I participated in an on-line tutorial with this year’s authors in the International Thriller Writers debut authors’ program. Afterward, I wrote a letter to each of them. I thought that some of you might be interested in what I said.

Dear Fellow ITW Authors—

I’m amazed by how far International Thriller Writers has come since Gayle Lynds and I co-founded it (with a lot of help from others) in 2004 at Bouchercon in Toronto. At that time, there were 84 members. Now we have thousands.